Poured Over: Jill Lepore on The Deadline

By Jenna Seery / August 24, 2023 at 6:00 am

“Having that store of memories that history can be, if done well, is a really tremendous form of solace.”

Jill Lepore, historian and author of These Truths, returns with The Deadline, a collection of essays ranging from the personal to the political. Lepore joins us to talk about how she came to compile this collection, her connection to Mary Shelley, and the progress to be made in what constitutes the historical record (and who gets to tell it) with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over.

This episode of Poured Over was produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.        
 
New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.     

Featured Books (Episode):
The Deadline by Jill Lepore
These Truths by Jill Lepore
This America by Jill Lepore
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones
A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn

Full Episode Transcript
Miwa Messer

I’m Miwa Messer, producer and host of Poured Over and Jill Lepore. I’ve been waiting to have this conversation with Jill Lepore for a bit, you know her from These Truths, This America. She’s been a finalist for the Pulitzer finalist for the National Book Award and also winner the Bancroft for a book that came out a minute ago, called The Name of War, but we may or may not get all the way back into your deep catalogue. But Jill, thank you so much for joining us, The Deadline is just out. And it’s 10 years’ worth of essays.

Jill Lepore

It’s a small selection of 10 years worth of essays.

00:45

This is I think it’s pretty great. I mean, I have to say, I didn’t realize quite how closely I’ve been reading you in the New Yorker until I started reading The Deadline. I was like, Oh, wait, this was Jill. You have such a wide range of material in this book, though. And I mean, obviously, some of the things that people have read, like If Then, the essay that started that book is in here, it’s kind of cool to see the starts of all of these different books. And they and you mentioned it to their little bits and bobs that have appeared in These Truths, but really, this is its own work. And I’m wondering if you could talk about how it started for you. Because, again, 10 years, not the complete body of work for tenure.

Yeah, yeah, well, first of all, hello, it’s really fun to get a chance to speak with you. Thanks for doing this. Yeah, it was an interesting thing to try to figure out what to do for a book of essays. Because I write about so many different things. And I sound a little bit like my mother used to say, it’s like telling a woman, she has a nice personality, when you compliment a writer on how prolific she is. It’s like, wait, but does that mean I’m good? Like, if you write a lot, that’s not a virtue in its own right. I am also willing to write about absolutely anything like, if I get an assignment, I’m very unlikely to turn it down. Partly because I just cannot imagine saying no, but you know, to the chance to, to write about something. But also, it’s, I’m curious about most things. So when I was asked to put together a collection of essays, I decided to limit it to just the last 10 years partly because it’s such been such an exceptional Ferris Wheel of American history. Roller Coaster doesn’t even really get it because it’s even sort of more inane than that. So I wanted to think about the political pieces over the last years that would contain the pandemic and would contain the Trump era. And so we’d have a kind of real time me trying to make sense of these unprecedented times as a historian, but then I also wanted to do something unusual for me, which is to gather together more personal pieces, which I quite infrequently write. And I’d never put those in a book before. But in fact, the title essay, “The Deadline” is a personal essay. And so I really brought that material to the fore, in that sense, it kind of comes early in the collection as well. And I think for me, as a writer who has run screaming from the personal essay as a form for my entire adult career, that that kid career, that was a big step to be willing to even, you know, see those between the pages of a book.

Honestly, I was a little surprised to see it. And I liked the way the collection, The Deadline is organized. And it feels like you start with the deeply personal and you move into sort of where we are now as people. And I’m just wondering, too, like, when you sat down to put all of these essays into one volume? Are you thinking about that sort of arc as you’re doing it? Or you’re just thinking, well, this is a great piece, and I’ll find the place for it in the book because it really flows and not every collection is designed to flow.

Oh, that’s that’s really nice to hear. Thank you. A friend of mine once said to me, the kind of brutal honesty that you get from friends, that she felt that my aversion to the personal essay was fundamentally misogynistic, that I really don’t like reading personal essays. And what I don’t like about them is I don’t like how many female intellectuals have been pressed into the service of the personal essay, and thereby lost their intellectual authority, which is not a loss that men suffer when you occasionally write a personal essay, but you expose your underside your soft belly, and it’s sort of over for you as someone who’s a serious thinker. I observed that from my very first years as a college student, and it really distressed me so it’s not really a form that I have a lot of have affection for but I also have a kind of strong aversion to because of the way that it sorts writers into categories in my field. I mean, I’m principally an American historian. All of the big selling big books are big books by men about men, you know, some guy writing a new biography of Andrew Jackson kind of thing. Walter Isaacson writing the new biography of Elon Musk, right? Women are not primarily the readers of those books. They’re not the subjects or their authors of those books. And I, as a historian been trying to think differently about what I can bring to the publishing world, in the world of letters, I guess. As a historian and as an intellectual, that’s different, but also wanting to reach readers. So I really backed away from the personal essay for a long time. And when this friend said to me, she thought this was in a deep way, kind of misogynist, we really wondered about that, whether I had belittled a form that happens to be dominated by women writers, out of basic prejudice, so. So part of starting this collection of essays with a few personal essays and ending up with, you know, the global pandemic and Trumpism. And the insurrection and the dismantling of American constitutional democracy, was trying to battle a little bit against what I think of as a kind of artificial divide between those genres that historians will always deny that the personal effects how they think about the past. And, you know, that was a really important intervention of mid 20th century feminism, that the personal is political in the past is also personal. So I think that’s maybe what I was trying to do there. I think more though, I’m giving you a fancy answer for what was just maybe kind of a really practical set of decisions.

So part of what I’m trying to get to a little bit is this idea that here you are historian writing about all of these different pieces that come together to tell the American story, right, whether you’re writing about the legal pieces, or the profiles of writers, I mean, I kind of feel like we’re living in a Frankenstein moment completely. So the idea that you’re writing about the Frankenstein monster, right, and that’s one of the pieces that made you a finalist for the Pulitzer, I just think all of these different essays come together to deliver a portrait of where we are now. And I think it’s kind of fascinating, given that you’re a historian, right? Like, the idea that you’re sitting in this very current moment. Yeah, I mean, the piece about your dad’s college library, and what he was reading and everything, like, it’s just, it’s a great piece. It’s never been published anywhere else. And it kind of fits perfectly, but I feel like I’ve got a really good idea of who your dad is. But I also have a little bit of a better idea of who you are, like, you’ve been clear in other interviews where you’re like, well, I never planned on studying history. You started as a math major, then you become an English major, then you come to history later via American Studies, which I mean, this tracks.

I don’t have any degrees in history, and I feel often that I it’s important to fess up to that I don’t actually think that’s a problem. I think that historical writing and literary criticism and literary analysis should considerably, you know, I was chair for many years at Harvard, where I teach over the history and literature program, which is a kind of combined undergraduate major takes the sensibilities of the new historicism and the linguistic turn and in in the social sciences, and brings them together like and that’s been going on for a really long time. So from the vantage of academic inquiry, it makes perfect sense that I have English degrees and American Studies degrees and work in the history department. From the vantage point of what I do more broadly, I really do think myself fundamentally, as a writer, like I only ever wanted to be a writer, I just couldn’t figure out how to get anything published. I went to graduate school because I needed health insurance. And then I ended up getting an academic job, and I still needed health insurance. So I’ve been incredibly blessed and fortunate to be able to have the chance to do the kind of teaching that I do and the kind of flexibility about what I teach and what I write that I haven’t been incredibly lucky in that way. But all of it from the very beginning was in the you know, the service of trying to figure out how to spend most of my days reading and writing.

Yeah, but that’s all context, right? Like that’s all context for the work that you’ve been doing. Whether you’re writing about Wonder Woman, or Joe Gould.

A reader wrote, he wrote a letter to the editor of the New Yorker saying was so it’s about a piece I forget what piece like I never thought I was interested in this subject and then I saw that Jill Lepore had written about it. So I read the piece and I loved it and I just want to say I would really like it if even if she would write an essay about the history of dirt, I would read it. And then I thought about that this spring because I wrote an essay about the history of seed catalogs, which is as close to about dirt as they’ve ever come.

But that curiosity that gets us, you know, from Rachel Carson and Ruth Bader Ginsburg to data science. I mean, just disruption, like a word that maybe has lost all meaning at this point, I think, possibly never quite meant what it was used to mean, and leaves out the people piece of all of it. You know, right. Technology is only as good as the people who program it like AI, still driven by humans, all of this stuff, right? Like, it’s a wild continuum. But yet, it’s just you being curious, figuring out how you get from what, how do you get an idea? I mean, it’s not just stuff that you’re assigned, though. I know you don’t say no to assignments, but you’re still the one who’s turning in the work.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I know I have some, I tried to be bold enough to say no, here and there when I really definitely need to, yeah, and often an assignment will be one thing, and I will turn in something that’s really very different, right? One of the things that I love about it, and for me thinking about the 10 years of American history that we all lived through that these essays are in one fashion or another wrestling with, you know, I’m the one sort of sitting at home saying, jeez, what’s gonna happen to society if we all live indoors? If not, then I get an assignment. Could you write an essay about the relationship of living indoors? living outdoors historically, like, do people live indoors? More? You know, here’s some books. Like, that’s just an incredible gift to have the opportunities? Oh, well, I’ll read these books. And then where do these books lead me? And what are the books that led me from those books to these books and just kind of leapfrog across the stream of my own ignorance to try to get to the other side ashore of some kind of knowledge about something where I could say something, especially the essays in this book, they really are a lot of things like something was going on and I was asked to kind of write about, and I was so grateful, because I myself am mystified by what’s going on. Like the disruptive, there’s an essay in the book on the idea of disruptive innovation, oh, it’s 10 years ago, now, maybe 2013 2014. And I’ve been just so baffled by, I was asked to write some kind of critics piece about the toll, really tsunami of books and the cultural impetus behind this kind of cult of disruptive innovation, and I’m writing to my editor and saying, I mean, I could, but how can anybody take this stuff seriously, like it actually, it just empirically is obviously wrong. Like, I it doesn’t take more of a glancing investigation of it to see that. It’s, it’s a belief system. That’s, you know, just found it on really, really bad understanding of how change happens from anything that, you know, any historical inquiry or historical method has ever been able to demonstrate or theorize. And it was like, I think maybe we’ll spend a little more time on it, because people take it very seriously. Like, a lot of people take this very seriously. And I was really, I was really surprised by that. And it was an essay that got a really overwhelming reaction, a polarized reaction. But that was in scale with how deeply people were invested, either for or against this idea, which was fascinating to me. And I think, some of that to be to be candid, some of that curiosity comes from my own seclusion. I mean, I’m essentially a hermit. So, and I’m really not online. Like, I’m very in touch with my students. Like, that’s a lot of, you know, chat. That’s a lot of hanging out with young people. So I have like, it’s not like, but I’m not like on a, like a tube floating along the river of the social media. Like, we just have a lot of stuff you read on, you know, that’s like a take on something that’s happened. Is this like, Wait, didn’t 9 million people just say that 20 seconds ago, I don’t, I’m just removed from that, which is, in many ways, totally irresponsible. But it’s a in most ways, for me, also, utterly essential. But it means that things like disruptive innovation, like I didn’t, I wasn’t entirely up to like, this was, you know, this was the little stream that everybody’s little inner tube was floating along. I didn’t know that. So I was sort of like, where are you people think you’re going like, this. Is this like a waterfall right there. That kind of thing is really fun. So it’s just it’s really nice to get like the you know, the little ping of email that says, Hey, have you thought about this at all? Because wondering what you make of that, and I hadn’t thought of it. And I’m, and I’m fascinated to know that people are thinking about it. And I wonder what they’re thinking about it. And then it’s a just a joy to try to make sense of it and write something that could maybe be meaningful.

But it seems to me that you always start with the people right, even if it’s Ben Franklin’s sister, that piece that started that book, Ben Franklin’s sister who does not have the vaulted invented life that her brother has have. That was that was a bit rough. But we’ve got her we’ve got a lot about, let’s call it organizations for the moment, right? Whether it’s school or government, or, you know, all of these big situational systems, I guess, is a better phrase for IT systems. And yet you never lose sight of the people. And I kind of love that. Because I mean, it seems to me that it would be very easy to fall in love with ideas, right? Like, how did we get from point A to point B disruption? I mean, I’m giggling a little bit as you talk about disruption. But again, like it really does leave people out of the equation, right? Like, it just leaves all kinds of folks out of the equation. And yet, here we are trying to tell the story, or here you are trying to tell the story of us as a culture, community, society, whatever word you want to use to describe us. And you’re pretty good about leaning into, you know, the evidence, right? Like, that’s one of the things I appreciate about reading you is that you want the details, you want all of the details, and if you can get them into one article, great. Sometimes it takes a couple, but it always starts with the people. And how do you find that though, as a scholar, I mean, essentially, you are, I mean, you’re an academic, how do you balance the humans and the systems?

Yeah, one of the essays you mentioned, it’s in this collection is, was about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and occasion for writing it was it was must have in 2018, that to understand the first publication, the first edition of Frankenstein, and there was a whole bunch of new, some quite lovely annotated editions of the book, but one was notably by a group of people who are interested in concerned about artificial intelligence. And so wanted to see, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a kind of Oppenheimer style warning about the consequences of technological change, absent an ethical consideration. And that is, from an ideal vantage one way to read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. And I don’t think it’s especially helpful, but the way that it troubles me as a reading of Frankenstein, is that it’s really just putting the past to use to a very particular use that, you know, these AI guys have, you know, let’s use Frankenstein this way. So when I agreed to read the write the piece I decided I really wanted to understand Mary Shelley better and I didn’t really understand much about Mary Shelley. I knew a lot about her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, like I give a regular lecture and a class that I teach about. Well, it’s like I knew when I was ready to really know Mary Shelley, but I had a former PhD student had written a dual biography of the two of them. And I read that and then I hadn’t realized that Mary Shelley had written a diary, essentially a literary journal. It’s sort of a Barnes and Noble special, it’s a list of basically the books that she read and her reactions to this a style of journal that you know, the kind of Boswell people did this right, write down what books you read, I did this when I was a kid. When I was Mary Shelley’s age, I kept a journal that was what I read and what I thought about it, and it was completely pretentious in the way that I was doing. But she was pregnant as a teenager, and had the series of pregnancies and losses, losses of pregnancies losses of her children. And it’s in that context that I came to understand the significance of Frankenstein. And then it really bothered me that a book written about the betrayal and or loss of a child comes to be put to, there are many uses you could put a book to, that’s fine. They want to do but the essay that I wrote about Shelley is really all about these miscarriages, and what it what it meant to lose all these babies. And I don’t think they’re really quite been done before. And it felt really meaningful and important to me to really put Mary Shelley’s writings, her private writings about those losses on the page and then see the book, the novel as a story of about many many, many, many things, but including grief.

You know, the way we talk about history now, and whether that’s literary history or socio political or economic whatever form history takes right whatever story about the past retelling, you know, readers bring their own experience to whatever it is they picked up. And, you know, writers same thing. I just I feel like there isn’t really anyone else who could write the way you do about this range of subjects. Next, because we’re also talking about Barbie and Bratz, and the intellectual property battle that happened there. So we’ve gone from, like, creating a new literary history of Frankenstein, right? Because that’s essentially what you did to intellectual property. And, you know, obviously, we’re living in a Barbie world as we take this, are we living in a Barbie world, but intellectual property? Hollywood’s on strike right now. And a lot of it has to do with IP right, and the creation of IP and who holds IP. And, you know, this kind of goes back to disruption, it kind of goes back to who gets to tell the stories about the thanks, right? Barbies, Bratz, Valley of the Dolls.

Yeah, I mean, I really love writing about the law and the history of the law rules by which we live. And that’s been a real source of fascination for me and pleasure in the chance to explore. I once started writing this book that I promised myself that one day I will go back to and finish about Dickens. But Dickens was obsessed with copyright, because he made no money in the United States. So he came to United States in 1842, to lobby for international copyright law, his reputation as the great poet of the poor. You know, this was after Oliver Twist, and he celebrated for, you know, writing these vivid accounts of the suffering of the poor and having them be real characters and in his tale with dignity, and then he was just trying to get Congress to pass a law that will increase his income, I find the whole history of copyright really interesting, but it does intersect with so many live concerns in our day that have to do with also freedom of speech, what can be said, who can say it, who needs to credit other people for saying things? With what authority do you speak with on what evidence are your claims based I have for several years taught a class on the history of evidence at the law school, and I’m just really interested in that, that will everybody loves a courtroom drama, but the Barbie versus Bratz series of lawsuits was just a really, really interesting set of cases. Because what part, what was litigated? Was the female form— is the Bratz or is the Barbie enough of a distortion differently, different kinds of distortions of the female form from each other to be original? It’s just like, these are judges having this argument about these two, in my view, really contemptible toys, which are just sucking each other dry. I just thought it was a great, it was a great story completely fascinated me. But yeah, I love looking at these legal struggles, struggles with a law which also just narratively is, though, is always going to be a really a really, really fun essay to write. There’s a lot of pieces in this collection that are about other courtroom dramas. So Griswold v. Connecticut, Obergefell v. Hodges, the chain of reproductive rights and same sex marriage cases, the chain of cases that gets you from Roe to Dobbs. I think that being able to situate contemporary, especially decisions of the federal judiciary, in a longer historical context is useful and important, because people are really especially, you know, younger readers are really just baffled, like, What the hell is happening? What, you know, what is actually going on? I love like, wow, let me start with 1215 and Magna, like, like, I have to like the pedants desire to let’s go back to the beginning and figure out what is law? What is fundamental law, who gets to decide what the rules are, and what the rules are that govern the government, but also try to do that in a way that meets the narrative standards have a lively, literary, general interest magazine, that’s the sort of fun trick to sell for.

So you are always thinking about the reader, as you write because I mean, again, writing about the law is not the simplest thing in the world to do in an engaging manner. There are plenty of people who write for legal journals, they do the heavy lifting that gets cited later on, but the kind of writing that you do isn’t simple. It seems easy, but it’s not simple.

Yeah, and I, you know, I am a total you know, journal article geek, like I can read journal articles all day long. Like that’s what I what I know about anything is a small subset of what people who spend their entire careers working. And the reason that I can get up to speed pretty quickly on a subject is because of the excellence of that, you know, my of scholarly monographs and academic journal articles, which is often where I go trawling for stories and I’ll come across something and say, Oh, wow, in the midst of a fairly turgid but fundamentally really interesting theoretical argument, there’s a footnote to you know, some actual human who wants experienced some kind of suffering or uplift because of this large turgid thing that was going on. And then I can kind of reverse engineer the story from the evidence, and then engage that. I remember once and I don’t think this is a collection. But I remember once I was asked if I’d write an essay about the history of taxation, because there were a few new books, and oh, like the tax scheme was being reevaluated. I don’t know what’s maybe the Paul Ryan moment before, like a kind of new Contract with America kind of thing. So there’s a new tax scheme and how can you possibly make the history of taxation interesting, like it doesn’t even belong in the New Yorker? Like, how can that be? I don’t, I don’t get that. But I was like, I actually kind of do want to know, I don’t know anything about the history of taxation. I ended up starting an essay with the San Francisco earthquake of 1906. Because the earthquake revealed in a purely physical sense, but also in a figurative sense, the instability of the banking system. Because when the banks fell to rubble, there was no money to rebuild the city, there was no federal infrastructure, there was no Federal Reserve Bank and it set off a chain of events earthquake, like that led to the Federal Reserve being founded and led to the 16th Amendment and the constitutional position of congress will power to tax income. And you could kind of tell the story from there. But at least you could start with an earthquake and figure people might read it. The thing someone once told me, it wasn’t my editor. Have you heard of the strap hanger test?

Yeah, I have. But why don’t you explain it to folks who are not on subways?

Yeah. So I gathered this is the classic New York Magazine world rule that as you’re writing, you should picture your reader on the subway. This is before smartphones. And so your reader has a copy of the magazine with your article in it. And the subway is packed standing on and it’s hot, and it’s sweaty, and people are miserable and grumpy, and it’s a lurching old subway car. And so your reader has one hand holding on to his standing up as one hand holding on to the subway strap, on the other hand, holding on to the magazine. And the distance between every word that little kerned space should be strong enough that if the word if the gap between the and gorilla was a page break, that your reader would be unable to resist letting go of the strap, in order to turn the page at the risk of being, thrown in jumbled into the next sweaty person that they’re already crammed into. So that for every single word as you choose the next word, does this word, pass the strapping or test let someone let go of the subway strap in order to get to this next word, I think it’s about all the time, kind of extremely useful. It’s like to live a bar, obviously, it’s much about the history of taxation. But it’s a really, it’s a good reminder that it is your obligation to hold the reader’s attention and, and not just their kind of passive, casual attention. But they’re sort of enraptured.

You’ve talked about this sort of across the board. But we’re living in this moment, right? Where acceleration, everything’s faster, production is faster, communications are faster, everything’s faster, right. And yet, historians are trying to figure out how to sort of wrap a narrative around. And if I just think about my own lifetime, right, the changes I’ve seen in my lifetime, especially in the last sort of 15-20 years, where you’re like, wait a minute, that’s kind of great. Like, there are some good things that have come out of the internet being the internet. And then there are moments where I’m just like, wait a minute, slow down, slow down, we don’t even know how to we don’t even have the language to talk about this. We don’t even know what the consequences could look like. Like we really are in a place in our society where we’re not thinking about consequences very much. It’s kind of like what like the algorithm is sort of keeping us in very much in the present day, right? And yet, here you are saying, well, I’m going to take this moment. And yeah, you’re going to write about taxation using the earthquake, which I’ve read that piece. It’s really great. And I think that’s the only way to do it. Because I can guarantee you that if someone had handed me an article that opens in an unexpected way, then I likely would not have made it through I likely might have just said oh yeah, I should come back to that at some point and read it and not read it at all. I mean, it sounds like you’ve constantly surprised yourself as you’re working them because you’re just letting that happen.

Because my ignorance is so wide and so deep that you know anything I’m asked to write about I really probably don’t know that much about it. And if I do know a lot about it, I’m less likely to actually do that assignment because it’s not going to be interesting enough. Having that store of memories that history can be, if done well, is a really tremendous form of solace. Not because this moment in time is particularly good, but because most problems are genuinely not new. And, you know, when you’re dating someone, and then you meet their family, and suddenly you understand the person that you’re dating in a deep, deep way that you didn’t really get people are like, oh, yeah, that’s, that’s fine she’s that way, like, I see that now. And that’s gonna be I don’t think she’s going to change about that, or, you know, he’s, he’s done is kind of built into him because his mother is like that and his father’s like, you know, like, you just feel oriented, and you know, what you’re dealing with. And maybe it’s it surely richer, and you might be happier about it, you might be less happy about it, but it is just that sense of, okay, now I kind of get where I am at, that I feel when I investigate the history of a problem. And then I still don’t know what to do about it, but at least I feel that I know something about it and it’s three dimensional to me, I’m not, I’m not stuck in it like Flat Stanley like slapped to a wall with it. Like I can kind of walk down the hall with it and look at it and look away from it. And then step ahead of it and turn around, look back at it and I can you know, walk behind it. And I like, I kind of can see it. So I remember when the pandemic first started, you know, everyone was sort of hot off the presses. What can we get people to write about that would be you know, people read that would be useful. And my editor sent me a box of books of novels about plagues. And I was just like, I remember I was I was stuck inside, and the box came, and I was so happy. Like, I have this whole box. You know, there’s Camus, there’s Defoe, this Mary Shelley, Steinbeck, there’s Poe. Saramago, there’s Octavia Butler, like there’s just all these brilliant beautiful writers thinkers have struggled with the problem of plagues that could end humankind or destroy the world that they know and love. And I have it all in front of me to just sit in I read just haphazardly I could not put any of it down. It was all full of wisdom and peril and hope and sorrow, and betrayal and discovery. This is what art is, you know, this is other humans trying to understand and share their sense of what it is to be human with this little magical box of pressed tree pulp, like that’s the coolest thing. Like who’s waiting for aliens or AI? Like, just the best thing humans ever came up with? Like, this is a great healer. So like for me then to not be sitting at home watching the, remember the curve, like every day you check the curve, when is the curve gonna flatten or just these things that go outside clanging the pots and pans at 7pm? Like the stuff filled you with helplessness on like there was a ritual to it. And I don’t know like blaming anyone but like, Thank you for clanging the pots and thank you for publishing the flatten the curve updates. But thank you for writing Journal of a Plague YearDaniel Defoe, because that actually helped me to think about what the terror is, what is it that we are afraid of and other human beings and when we find them to be contagious? What do we do with that? Every like every assignment is like that, you know, like, I’m struggling with this thing. It’s really hard to think about but look, hey, here’s a blog came from the New Yorker is like a bunch of books. And you know, your job, you we will actually pay you to read these books and write something. Nothing in my life has ever been more unexpected or more magical than that.

Which brings me to my favorite essay in the book, which is “Just the Facts, Ma’am”. Because you’re playing with sort of the intersection of history and fiction, which is essentially what you just described, but I do love it when you’re sort of challenging history and saying, well, it doesn’t do all of the things that fiction can do. It doesn’t tell us the emotional truth, that doesn’t get us to the nut of the thing. It doesn’t tell us the stories of sort of average people, right? Like, it’s really hard to write about. Average people, if there’s no record, you’re left building stories out of historical record, because you have primary sources that someone left behind. And not a lot of women got to leave their stories behind, right? Like, Jane Franklin was rare. She left a trail and I just do you still wrestle with that idea, though, what we can do with history and what we can do with fiction. I know you’ve co-written a novel. But I mean, it seems like the essay really is a form that you love, and you can investigate whatever you want wth the form, right? There are no real limits.

Yeah, I mean, the Just the Facts essay, I love too, so I once compiled a book of essays that was going to be called “Just the Facts”. And then I was like, ah, I shouldn’t publish this. But like, that I felt like was this huge, big intervention I’ve been trying to make as a historian, that’s not by no means alone, right, like, feminist critique of subjectivity and of social history and its limits. But what I was trying to explain there is that modern historical writing with its culture of empiricism, which involves the denouncing and disavowal of humor, pleasure, passion, pain, sympathy, empathy, desire, fury, really, to a large degree, that personal was a reaction against the emerging form of the novel in the 18th century, which was all of those things. It was the personal, passionate, furious, loving, arduous, exhausting chronicle of the private lives of ordinary people. And that divide that has all kinds of lasting consequences for us today, not least than like, they’re just totally annoying, completely crude and unproductive, history, wars have a kind of contemporary cultural moment. But, you know, that’s just a kind of a weird rehash of that, that debate. But it is still the case. I mean, in this is a kind of publishing piece, Radcliffe did a pretty interesting study some years ago about gender and the publishing industry. And, you know, it’s really tough to see in history, that for the longest time, you know, all of the so called big books, the ones you knew were gonna get play in the marketplace, where, you know, David McCullough writes about John Adams, and you know, God bless, like, nice book, it’s not the book that historians would ever consult. I mean, I think it’s fundamentally wrong about John Adams. But, you know, it’s fine for like this sort of Father’s Day history club book, that’s going to be 700 pages, and going to have an initial print run of 200,000 and going to sell in the millions and is going to be blurbed by Joseph Ellis and John Meacham and, you know, the all the other lovely gentleman in that club is not a chronicle of the imagined past. That’s why my friend Jane Kaminsky, and I ended up trying to try this novel, because there’s that well, it’s tricky trying to write about ordinary people, when you can only write about them in the aggregate, you know, infant mortality rates and life expectancy of men and women and you know, about enslaved people in the aggregate, you know, you know, about the rate of fatality on the voyage, or in the first months, and you know, about the sex ratio, and like, how is that ever going to compete with the cinematic, you know, Paul Giamatti wins an Emmy for playing John Adams like that, because he’s a character. I mean, read his diaries, he is completely fascinating. Like, the guy is just obsessed with himself and his power in the world and his life, his sense of his lack of it. He’s a completely great character, like, you can’t, you can scramble. And you know, yes, you could come across Mary Shelley’s diary, but for a lot of people, it’s just, it’s just never going to be there. And that’s what the novel was for. That’s what the novel was invented to do. And then to have a novel that sort of novel denigrated as genre fiction, right? Like we call that a romance or whatever, you know, whereas the literary fiction is going to be the Jonathan’s. And that’s going to be, I’m sorry, making enemies of all these writers whose work I totally respect but just like, where does that work get done. And I you know, so much of what I think for people who don’t read a lot of history, The 1619 Project was, it was like their generations Howard Zinn’s People’s History. And for all that both of those projects are neither of them has an academic account of the past either, right? That’s, that’s, that’s accountable in the same ways. So, you know, that’s why I wrote this essay that’s in the book about Jane Franklin explains why I wrote that book in terms of personal reasons, but the professional reasons I wrote it had to do with okay, I could use the story of Jane Franklin Benjamin Franklin’s rags to rags sister and her life of, you know, considerable loss. She had 12 children and lost 11 of them and lived really in poverty her whole life as an allegory for the story of how the other half lives, which was a poor Richard proverb. And in one of my more, I don’t know, just, I was rocked by this, I thought this was the most ambitious thing I’d ever written. Like, totally clearly, to me, this was an indictment of the whole historical profession, was an indictment of the publishing industry was this, you know, whole kind of reexamination of what the founding of the United States was about the limits of constitutional argument, like it had all these big implications, at the level of the discipline at the level of our attention as consumers of historical heritage, whatever. And the book, totally packaged and received as, oh, some girl wrote a book about some girl like it was like, Oh, this is like, you know, Cleopatra’s daughter, or Galileo’s sister, or, I don’t know, Copernicus’s mother in law, like this was just another book, like some girl wrote about like the girl. And like, as if Virginia Woolf never wrote about Shakespeare’s sister, or there had never been a tradition of attempting to do this kind of storytelling for the sake of expanding our notion of what lives command literary attention. really drove me nuts really completely took me by surprise, so it was like, the most twee, oh, it’s like a Holly Hobby doll. Like the first jacket I got for that book was literally like a ye oldie colonial silhouette of a granny on a rocker. Like, you gotta be kidding me. I really was trying to write this badass, like, burn it all down indictment of the historical profession, and the cult of the founding fathers. And it’s like, going to be on the girl table with the I don’t know, I just like with the Holly Hobby dolls.

Yeah, I get it. No, no, I totally get it. And part of it for me, too, is like it goes back to who gets to tell stories? Right? Who’s the historical record? And what do we do with that information? Right, like, we’re still interpreting what people and there have been some wild moments recently where people have misinterpreted, you know, law, history, other sorts of things, and still decided that they were in the right, and it’s kind of wild to see and everything. Now, I don’t want to say everything’s open to interpretation. But I’d really like us to look at what we consider canon and how we mark things as canon. And yeah, that’s partially history. But that’s also partially who we are now. And to do need to make like you were just talking about popular history versus sort of, you know, academia. And can we have both? I just feel like, there are people who hold on to the pop history in a way where they’re just like, well, academia doesn’t matter. And certainly, the academics were like, I can’t with the pop history. And I’m kind of thinking, but isn’t it good to have all of the things that could bring someone to a different place? I mean, that’s how I feel about These Truths, like the way you handle a lot of the material in These Truths where you’re like, listen, we’re hypocrites, we’re straight up hypocrites. There’s a lot of good things that we do and there’s this shared sense of purpose that we need to have. But we’re also hypocrites, and we have to talk about genocide, and we have to talk about all of the ugly bits, right— slavery, all of it. If you think about how emotionally caught up people get right when they’re talking about history and interpretations of history. Doesn’t matter what you’re, all I’m saying is everyone has a point of view. And some people get really wound up when they’re talking about. Yeah, and essentially, what we’re all trying to do is say, well, can’t we just get all of the pieces? Right? Like, I’m not saying that other things don’t matter entirely. I’m just saying I would like my seat at the table, please. And that’s the thing where I’m like, we’re not there yet, man. We’re still having conversations we’ve been having over and over and over again, about history, and citizenship and all of these things from like, oh, we’re still here.

And that it is frustrating because the kinds of scholarship that’s been done over the last 50,60 years, you know, Chicano History, Asian American history, disability history, history of the conservative movement, history of science, really interesting work in the history of law. You know, obviously, like, Black history has just, you know, exploded since really since the late 1950s. And that work hasn’t always successfully made it out of the academy. And so a lot of the academics are mad at popular history is really a proxy for that, right? Popular history tends to has really just not done a good job. It’s marketed to a certain kind of audience that wants a certain kind of whitewashed, or maybe they don’t want it honestly. But that’s what’s being marketed to them. I think there’s a lot of fearfulness it can cause now the other thing like gets the publishing, I don’t mean to be indicting publishers. But like, you know, it’s not the case that either American history is a story of the march of progress and freedom from the beginning to now, or that the story of American history is a litany of atrocity. Like, both of those things are true, and neither of those things are true and that’s just maybe more complicated to market and it’s harder to market to a segment of the population like, but why shouldn’t everybody be reading, you know, this breaking new book about Chinese exclusion, like that would be great, like, that’d be really helpful book to have, like the everybody should be reading, everybody should be reading that it should be being pushed out to that, like Father’s Day group of people that once read John Adams, like why not? I don’t understand like that that piece of the caution. Where it has a consequences that are somewhat new, and will be nevertheless abiding has to do with the Supreme Court’s turn to a particular kind of originalism and sometimes called traditionalism. So if you think about the big cases in the last two years, the overturning of Roe v Wade, the Bruen case, which is a gun rights case, and affirmative action case, they’re relying on a model of jurisprudence that says, well, we can’t do anything we have to, we have to overturn Roe, we have to make gun laws, declare them unconstitutional, we have to declare affirmative action unconstitutional because all we can really do is look to the historical record. And if we can’t find a precedent that looks and it’s not exactly precedent, like a tradition that differs from this and that’s how that’s how we’re going to be proceeding. And, you know, for most of American history, women and people of color just couldn’t have, couldn’t run for office, couldn’t vote, couldn’t really express political opinions in a way that would ever reach elected officials, or could ever possibly be conceived to have an influence on them. And yet, now, everyone is being asked to abide by a historical tradition as the American historical tradition. That is really just judges reading the worst possible, historical and most, you know, frustratingly narrow account of the American past. So when you say the canon, absolutely, like in a literary sense, we in in in in a scholarly sense, we need to have a much bigger understanding of that, of that past, but in a very urgent constitutional sense, we desperately need that.

And I’m hoping we can do it sooner rather than later. Because when you say urgent, yeah, that’s the word we want. That is, in fact, the word we want. But on that note, too, can I ask what you’re working on next?

I’m on leave this year. So I have 1000 projects that I’m still playing with, but I am for sure, trying to finish a book that I’ve been researching for years, which is trying to shake up that notion of our constitutional history by looking at all the ways that people have tried to amend the US Constitution. And the premise of the book is not it’s not a policy argument, but the impetus for the book is just to say, if we’re going to be making judicial decisions about you know, well, whether a six-year-old can bring an AR 15 to kindergarten, based on a historical tradition that says there’s nothing that says you can’t do that. We need to have a much richer understanding of what, what America’s constitutional tradition is. And that’s going to involve looking at the demands of people who had really no political voice whatsoever. And the book sort of attempts to try to constitutionalize them. So an example that I often give when the delegates of the Constitutional Convention Philadelphia in 1787, were getting ready to begin their sessions, they had made a decision that sessions would be seek If they would have to take a vow of secrecy for 50 years, and it’s like a sequestered jury, they weren’t allowed to read the newspaper or send messages, you know, get mail, send mail. The last letter that Benjamin Franklin received before the sequester was from his sister, and she wrote him from Boston and just her usual like, totally fake flattery, like, oh, you men are so wise, thank you for writing a whole new system of laws for all of us, like, Thank you. You’re so brilliant. By the way, I hope you’ll beat the swords into plowshares. Like this kind of call for peaceability. A plea for nonviolence, um, she’s very religious, like it is just a biblical refrain. But if we were creative, originalists, I don’t know if that could be part of our canon for how we think about whether the Second Amendment was actually ratified by women. Can it be said to have been ratified in any meaningful way? When I think if we looked at a lot of other correspondents, we might find many similar expressions of concern about, you know, she was a woman who lived through the Siege of Boston, a lot of women were raped by British soldiers. During that siege, a lot of people were beaten up by soldiers with bayonets. Jane was in Boston during the Boston Massacre when shots were fired, and five innocent people were just killed. So she had views about guns and militias, and they’re not in the constitution. So should women just not have to abide by that? Like, is it not our Constitution? Like, how do we make it a constitution that works for everybody? That’s the premise of the project. We’ll see. It’s I will say this, it is full of surprises.

Yeah, but that’s part of the fun of reading you I mean, you get in to the material in a way that they’re really is something for everyone, when you’re writing, and I just, I can’t stress that enough that you’re just not, you’re Jill Lepore just telling a story. That’s really what I get when I’m reading you. And I will ask though, can we have the Dickens book at some point? Because, copyright is a thing where I’m just like, I would really like someone to write that book. I think we’re just not having enough, conversely, I, there are other stuff that is slightly more urgent, but I do think the Dickens copyright book…

I have a giant wall size map of the United States in the year that he toured with all of his stops and all of the dates and I look at it every day, and kind of just slap myself for having ditched it. I loved that project. Maybe there’ll be time one day.

Time one day is kind of it, but do you think you’re just gonna keep sort of alternating between essay collections and larger narrative works?

I don’t know. I don’t know. Essays are definitely more fun for me than books. I get very, very restless. I love writing an essay. I love the intensity and the sort of fury of it all and then I love that it’s over. And I never have to really think about that subject again. And a book I once said, to set a talk and my husband was like, I can’t believe you said that. But it is true. I sometimes think like, you know, book is a marriage. But an essay is just an affair. Like it’s just like, I have no knowledge of these things other than like soap operas, but that’s how I think about like, you’re, when you’re in a book like you, you’re in it, you really you’re really in it and it will never go away. People will ask people still ask me about my first book that I wrote when I was basically like a brainstem. And I don’t remember a thing about it. I don’t think I really know nothing about King Philip’s War, which is a subject of my first book, but essays yeah, they just sort of they vanished, they vanished behind you. And I kind of love that.

And that seems like a really good place to wrap this interview. Jill Lepore, thank you so much. The Deadline out now. There’s a lot of back list. So if you haven’t read the other stuff, go back and check that too. Thanks so much.